Today we are diving into a festive season special all about choosing toys that really benefit your child’s development. In this episode I’m joined by Tove and she is going to ask me questions about selecting toys that are not just entertaining but also really enriching for your little one’s growth. We cover questions like what value do toys bring to development and are all toys created equal.
I also share my top toy tips for a tight budget and tips on how to use simple items like boxes for imaginative play and blocks and balls and so on. We also discuss toys that encourage language skills and active movement so this is perfect for your little one’s growing development and as well as their minds as well. So join us as we explore how the right toys can make all the difference this holiday season.
Welcome to Sense by Meg Fora, the podcast that’s brought to you by Parent Sense, the app that takes guesswork out of parenting. If you’re a new parent then you are in good company. Your host Meg Fora is a well-known OT, infant specialist and the author of eight parenting books.
Each week we’re going to spend time with new mums and dads just like you to chat about the week’s wins, the challenges and the questions of the moment. Subscribe to the podcast, download the Parent Sense app and Catchmaker every week to make the most of that first year of your little one’s life and now meet your host. WinFun is a pioneering brand in child development toys.
Since 2005 WinFun has been crafting innovative play things that blend education with fun, catering to children from newborn to toddler age. Their mission? To help little ones win new skills by sparking imagination and curiosity through interactive play fun. Welcome back mums and dads.
This is Sense by Meg Fora and I am Meg Fora and today is one of the episodes that we love so much which is where I get interviewed by Tove on a very specific topic and we thought that because we were coming up for Christmas and the festive season for most of us, we should start to look at actually good toys to choose for our little ones and how do we choose a toddler toys impact development. So I’ve asked Tove to come on board. So a huge warm welcome to you Tove.
Thanks for having me Meg, it’s good to be here. I always find the Christmas period very stressful because the kids feel like they’ve got a lot of toys but then also choosing the right toys and making sure they’re actually developmentally valuable is always tricky and not just making lots and lots of noise at me. Well I can attest for the fact that you are impossible to buy toys for, for your kids.
They have got absolutely everything because every time I’ve had to buy something for them for any birthday or for Nova who’s my goddaughter, I end up really battling because you guys really do have everything. So I don’t know, I think everything I’m going to mention today you’ve probably got. I’m not going to lie, I think I do.
But I do think this is great for parents going into Christmas because as you said like it is often, it’s definitely something that I see in the mom’s groups I’m in is you know what toys are actually good for my kid versus you know what is just look shiny and has a light and you know is makes a noise. So to kick that off and I think it’s a great way to start it is what values do toys actually bring to our kids development and are kind of all toys created equal or some better than others? I know there’s the like noisy toy debate versus the wooden toy debate by some groups of parents so that’s where I’ll start us. Yeah so let’s create three camps of interactions that kids can get involved in and the first involves no toys okay just human interaction and human play.
The second one involves things that you find in nature and that you don’t need to buy or things you find around the house and the third thing would then be to actually go out and get specific toys. So each of those do hold merit. The first one which is time with parents and imaginary play and open-ended play and just free play just kind of you know being and existing and you know tickle time and that sort of thing is very important and I think you know in some ways and it’s it sounds like a little bit of a throwaway comment but we are our children’s best toy.
So I want to just start off there and say that if you are financially cash-strapped, if you cannot get to the shops because you live in the middle of nowhere or if you know if you are concerned around your child’s development and think that there’s maybe some guilt around not being able to provide them with toys, I want to say straight off the bat that you actually really are your child’s best toy and I think that is a very important starting point for today’s conversation that parents and time and engagement and language is the number one thing that you can do. So if it’s a choice between time and a toy, go for time every single time because it really will be the most enriching thing for your child. The second thing is is that there’s a lot of stuff around the house that mean you do not need to buy toys.
So an example is an obstacle course, just taking up a whole lot of cushions off the couches is an absolutely wonderful thing or sitting them down in the kitchen while you’re cooking with a pot and a wooden spoon and a whole lot of cups and just letting them just play with the things around the house or Tupperware, the Tupperware cupboard, very best thing. Yeah, very best thing. Hours of entertainment.
Exactly and in fact I’ll tell you a very funny story today. One of the things that we used to do and we’ve got a very funny picture that can attest to this is that when I was in the kitchen, I would sometimes unpack the lowest shelf of our fridge was actually a freezer, you know, one of those bottom chest freezers at the bottom of the fridge and we’d actually sometimes open that up and take out the drawers and leave it open completely while I was preparing a meal because it was fascinating for Emily, this was our third child, to actually go in and put her hand on the cold kind of icy shelf and then come back out anywhere and you know of course that is such a wonderful learning experience. She’s learning about temperature and the one day she does this and she sticks her tongue on it and she got stuck to it.
Can you send that post a picture, let’s load it with the podcast because I feel like that’s very important to share. Very real and she learned a wonderful life lesson in that moment. So lots can go wrong and in the house that actually has got nothing to do with toys.
So there you got two categories that are very important. Having said that, toys have been developed for a reason and that’s because they are very, very valuable for our little ones. They provide an opportunity to experiment with something that they maybe wouldn’t be able to find around the house or to think about something and be curious about something that opens avenues that actually are not available through day-to-day things.
Like for instance, if you take a pop toy where you push a button and something pops up, that’s such a classic cause effect toy. It’s one of our favorite toys and it teaches them about cause and effect and you wouldn’t really be able to learn that with a pot and a wooden spoon necessarily or just with engagement with mom and dad. So I do think that toys are valuable and that they really do bring value to our lives.
They’re not all created equal and there’s a reason for that. There’s reasoning behind that. The one is that there’s a lot of toys that are just pieces of junk and they break the first month over and they are made from non-reusable plastic and so I don’t like Chinese junk and actually, sorry to say that, but my husband will often say, you know, for my kids at Christmas when they were little, they’re not getting Chinese junk, like mass-produced junk that’s going to end up in a landfill.
So I think they’re not all created equal. I think there’s been a wonderful trend amongst new enlightened conscious parents towards wooden toys and they are not created the same as plastic toys. There’s more time, there’s more natural resource that is more sustainable and so toys are not created equal.
Toys are also not created equal in that some toys are actually dangerous and are really not good for children. So a case in point would be a toy from the 1960s that was painted in lead paint. That was how it was back in the day and so that is not as good as a toy that now doesn’t have lead paint on it.
And likewise, they’re toys that actually I think just occupy space and make a noise and add very little value and so I would veer away from those as well. And then they’re also the toys that are so sophisticated and so fancy that no kids actually really engage with them. They’re bored with them and they never really get on with it, you know, and so they’re a waste of money.
So toys are not created equal and that’s what we’re really going to talk about today is how do you pick those toys that are kind of the cream of the toy crop. And if you don’t have a big budget, what are the five toys you would prioritize for your kids? So I always say stick to the five B’s and those five B’s are my absolute favorite toys in the cupboard. So the first one is blocks and when we talk about blocks, we are talking about very often not necessarily colored blocks, so they can just be like varnished pieces of wood or they can have color to them, but generally a rectangular shape that a child can create into absolutely anything.
So if you take, think about a block, a block can be a cell phone, they can put it to the air and pretend they’re speaking to you, imaginary player. Or a block can be put in a pattern in a circle around some plastic cars and suddenly the blocks are a crawl and they are a field for animals to be kept in. Or they can be tied up on top of each other and then pushed over by a six month old, which is of course a wonderful idea behind cause and effect.
So blocks can be absolutely anything and so blocks would have to be one of my top five toys that if you don’t have a budget that I would invest in. And not necessarily locking blocks, locking blocks are things like Lego and Duplo and those type of things. They are wonderful as well, but I’m talking about just bog standard, cheapest chips, blocks.
The second B has got to be books. Books are just the most incredible way to engage with language and we can definitely unpack that a little bit more later on, but books would have to be in that list and books encompasses everything through from a plastic book that can go in the bath and that can be chewed on by a four month old all the way through to a cardboard book that’s got, lift the tabs so you can look underneath and search for something all the way through to obviously our novels and our paper books which have stories and pictures in them. So that would be our second B, books.
Our third B would be bubbles and the reason I love bubbles is that they, first of all they’re just for fun and of course all play has to just be for fun. So I love bubbles from that perspective, but they’re also great in terms of eye control. So having our little ones track images across and watch for them and so it will track bubbles.
They’re great for eye hand coordination because as it comes close to you, you can see it. Now it’s coming so slowly that you’re able to reach out, coordinate it and actually pluck that bubble from the air and of course it ends up popping it and then of course the popping is just so much fun. So I think bubbles would have to be my third B. My fourth is, and again, cheapest chips is a ball and it doesn’t matter how big, how heavy, how light, anything that is round and filled with air constitutes a ball and they are absolutely wonderful for little ones.
And you can get rubber balls and you can get sponge balls and they can be used in the bath and they can be used to kick and they can be used to teach to throw and they can chase after them. So balls would have to be the fourth one. And then my fifth toy that I would 100% prioritize is actually a box.
The box that anything comes in is one of the best toys that you can give your baby and again, completely cheap. And if you haven’t bought a big fancy tumble dryer in the last month, head off now down to some sort of shopping center and go into their boxes and their crates in the back of the shop and go and get the biggest box you can find and bring it home. You can paint it or you don’t have to, but that box will become an incredible tool.
It will be a car, it will be a aeroplane, it will be a house. Anywhere your imagination goes, a box can go to. So those would be my five non-budget toys.
That’s amazing. And you mentioned boxes. So what value do they bring? Are they good for kind of spatial awareness? What are some creative ways to use boxes to enhance problem-solving skills and other developmental milestones, language? So boxes, just like toys aren’t all created equal, neither are boxes.
And what informs how differently a box can be used is its size. So that’s the key thing. And you want boxes of different sizes.
So first of all, in terms of spatial awareness, try and get a massive box and as big a box as you can get. And like a tumble dryer box or a fridge box or any box that furniture comes in. Because what’s great about big boxes is you can get in and under them.
And the minute you can climb in or under something, it tells you about the spatial quality of your own body. And that’s actually the very first foundation for a child to learn spatial awareness. And let me just take your mind down a massive trajectory here.
But spatial awareness is the foundation for math skills, engineering skills, architectural skills. So any job and subject at university that you can think of that involves space and how you put things together. So engineering is a really good example.
Most of your STEM careers, they have as the absolute foundation, spatial awareness. And the foundation of spatial awareness, which we have hopefully by the time we kind of get entering school age, the foundation of that is actually body awareness, which is how big is my body. So I am bigger than this table when I’m 18 months old, when I’m taller than the table, or I can fit under this table when I’m 18 months old, becomes the precursor to this can go within that or can be part of that.
And so it creates a spatial awareness of the world. So that’s one of the ways that the boxes can be used. A big boxes in particular is just by climbing in and out and under and through.
And likewise, you know, we once got this incredible box and I cannot for the life of me remember what came in it, but it was about three meters long. And it was probably about 45 centimeters, half a meter high and square. So it was really just a very long 45 centimeter high tunnel of three meters.
Jeez, that box was used for months and months as a tunnel. And you can see what’s happening there. You are practicing crawling, you are going through, you’re throwing balls through it so you can go and chase after them.
I mean, it really is fabulous for spatial awareness. And then with your smaller boxes, they can then be used to be stacking boxes. So similar to blocks.
So, you know, put something on top of inside, put a small box inside a big box. They can be used to then build things. So, you know, a lovely activity.
And I have a nephew who lives on the island where I live, who lives near me. And when he was little, I used to keep every single piece of packaging that came for anything, whether it was an egg box, a glass jar or any boxes. And I had a box in the garage that was my waste box.
And when Luke would arrive, he would immediately say to me, can we please go get the waste box? And out would come the waste box. And I had double sided tape, which was more simple for him to use than glue because I didn’t want the mess. And he would double side tape the most incredible constructions, rocket ships, houses, buildings, blocks of flats, dolls houses.
So he could make it into absolutely anything. And so that’s a way, you know, it’s an incredibly open ended activity because there was no plan as to what it had to end up as. And he could take it anywhere he wanted to.
So boxes are really, really fabulous as open ended toys to enhance problem solving. And so kind of staying on the kind of box concept, shape sorters, which go into like a box like structure, kind of like the giggle and learn electronic shape sorter are popular for kind of spatial reasoning. How do you recommend introducing these toys to a baby and what skills do they develop and why is it valuable? This episode is brought to us by ParentSense, the all in one baby and parenting app that helps you make the most of your baby’s first year.
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And so kind of staying on the kind of box concept, shape sorters which go into like a box like structure, kind of like the giggle and learn electronic shape sorter are popular for kind of spatial reasoning. How do you recommend introducing these toys to a baby and what skills do they develop and why is it valuable? Yeah, so I mean there are hundreds of different shape sorters. So you can start with something really as simple as just a bucket that has got a lid on top of it that’s got holes cut into certain shapes which you can actually make at home.
And usually with a little baby you would start with a circle, a triangle, and a square, just those three. And then you would have shapes of the same shape obviously that they could insert into there. Then you’ve also got puzzles and form boards where you’ve got the shape of a pig cut out of a form board and a little outline of a pig, a little picture of a pig with a little kind of pig on it that you can put into that shape and that’s the start of puzzles.
And then you’ve of course got the giggle and learn which is a really lovely shape sorter. It’s electronic so it has other reward systems other than just the reward of actually getting the shape inside the shape sorter. And so any of those really, really works really well for spatial reasoning.
And you’re right, it is part of that trajectory that I started with of boxes and fitting yourself into a box later becomes if I can fit into this box because I’m this size or I can’t fit into that box because I am not that size. And I mean all of us as moms have had a very amusing moment of watching our child trying to wedge themselves into something that they cannot fit into and how long they will take to try and get into it and then realise actually I’m bigger than this. Well of course that’s the foundation for a shape sorter because it’s working out that actually this thing fits into that shape correctly and that then becomes a precursor to learning our shapes later.
So in terms of introducing it to little ones, I would start super simple and the giggle and learn is a good example of that because it’s just very simple shapes and it has a quick reward. So I would definitely be starting with that. Later on, you could go into shape sorters that have got like nine or 10 shapes on it.
So lots of different shapes that you can work out where they go and then there’s more chances for error. And I’ve seen one of the toys in your home where those shapes are on different sides of a cube as well. So now you’ve got to work out.
So the circle doesn’t fit into the square, but there is no square on this top side. So now I’ve got to turn it onto the other side and find the circle shape on the side. So that can become much more complex in terms of having to problem solve how the heck do I get this into there.
And then later on, you go into the form boards with like the pig fitting into the pig shape. And then later on, you go into the puzzle. So a four piece puzzle and then a six and then an eight and then a 24 piece puzzle where there’s a specific shape that has to fit into another shape next to it or another outline next to it.
And all of that would be the progression towards actually puzzling and creating things. And for gross motor development, what type of toys do you recommend to encourage walking? Because that’s always a big milestone that parents are stressing about. Yeah, it’s an interesting milestone because I think it is almost the milestone we get most stressed about is, you know, when is my child going to walk? And we get fixated on buying them shoes and we want them up on two feet as soon as possible.
But I’m actually very much of the thought that actually don’t encourage walking. They will walk. 90% of children, you know, even children who are not typically developing children and who are special needs will actually walk.
So don’t get fixated on walking because a much more important milestone is actually crawling. So let them crawl for as long as possible. So I don’t think that we have to encourage walking.
But having said that, there are fabulous tools to encourage walking, which you would normally start introducing those toys at about 10 months, nine or 10 months when they’re starting to cruise. So how do you know that your child is ready to start learning to walk? They should be quite proficient at cruising, which means they’ll stand on the edge of a table, a coffee table, and they’ll walk their way along the coffee table, holding onto the coffee table. That’s called cruising.
And once your little one’s doing that, they’re probably ready for some of our walking toys. So one of the walking toys that I do absolutely love is a really simple wheelbarrow type thing. It’s a toy cart, and they’re usually actually filled with blocks.
So now we’ll tick the block box as well. You’ve got blocks in the bottom, and you’ve got a little handle that’s about the height of a toddler, and they can put their stuff inside it and they can push that. And that’s a lovely example of a walking toy because they can see over it.
And then they also come in quite fancy kind of toys where, you know, kind of there’s a handle and there’s maybe a form board in the front, and it makes some music as you go. So you can get into some really fancy and expensive walking toys, but either of those is absolutely fine. And the most important thing with walking toys is that they’re not, our little ones are not enclosed inside of them like walking rings.
So walking rings do not teach children to walk. They in fact inhibit children from learning to walk. And that is something that I would not encourage you buying.
Rather go for that kind of push along toy. That’s a much better strategy. So we’ve done the push along.
Let’s move to the pull along toys. So pull along toys like a pull along sort and learn turtle or my pull along pal elephant are excellent for encouraging walking. What are some tips on how to use those effectively? Yeah, I love the pull along toys.
And of course, we all had them when we were growing up as well. And generally as their wheels moved in the old days, they used to make a little noise. And now they are much more advanced like these pull along toys are.
So I love them. They are usually come after the push along toys because it’s easier to push a toy and it’s more stable to push a toy because they are more stable than the pull alongs because the pull alongs are generally on some sort of string. They generally not as stable and you generally need to be quite stable yourself in order to pull them.
So they would be the next progression from the push along toys into the pull along toys. And they’re great fun because kids love taking things for a walk. And very often our dogs, as long suffering as they are with our toddlers, are not prepared to be pulled along.
So to have something that’s at the end of a string and that actually does something as it comes along with you is great fun. And that’s why I do love the sort and learn turtle and then also the little pal elephant as well are also fabulous. So we’ve kind of done the push, the pull, and then I want to circle back to the balls. So balls, as you kind of flagged early on, are a classic toy for developing gross motor skills.
Are there any specific types of textures that are more beneficial for babies, and what are the balls that should be used at different ages or for different sensory types? Yeah, so that’s a great question. So as I mentioned, a ball is anything that’s kind of got air inside of it and is round. Our very first ball that actually works really well for little babies is a balloon or a bubble, because both of those actually move very slowly through the air, because they’re very light and they’ve got a large surface area, so they move very slowly.
So one of my favourite activities to do with balloons is to suspend a balloon on a play gym at your baby’s feet and get them, and this is, I’m talking about like for a three-month-old, a little one, and to get them to actually kick that balloon away with their feet, or if it’s over their changing mat, to bat that balloon with their hands, because how slowly it moves allows them the time to coordinate that eye-hand coordination of, wow, okay, it’s coming, I can lift my hand. If I lift my hand at that pace, I’ll actually swipe the ball at whatever point or my feet. So I love balloons.
The big caveat there is that you can never take your eyes off a child when they’ve got a balloon, and one of my absolute pet hysteria around child safety is not to have balloons in children’s mouths, and kids automatically try and get things to their mouth, that’s the age and stage they’re at, and then I have heard a story when my little boy was a baby of a child who had a balloon popped in his mouth and the piece blocked his airway. So you want to be super careful around balloons and little ones, never take your eyes off them, and if there are broken pieces of balloons, please immediately throw them away. So balloons are a good option because they do move slowly, but make sure you supervise your child.
And then from there, you can go on to bigger balls. So from balloons, you grade onto bigger balls, also about the size of a balloon, kind of maybe 10 to 20 centimeters in diameter, and also as light, usually they are light plastic balls, super simple, and these are cheapest chips, you can pick them up anywhere, and this is often a fabulous activity for a crawling baby because it can crawl away, it can be pushed away from them, they can crawl after it, and obviously for a toddler because they can learn to kick with it. And also the big balls are great because the only way to catch a big ball is with two hands, and that’s what you need to do is that both hands coming together, grabbing the ball, pushing it away or throwing it or whatever.
So big balls are wonderful. And then later on, you would grade into your small balls like tennis balls and so on as they get into the preschool years. The other type of balls that I do think Warren mentioned are balls with textures, and they’re amazing.
And when my kids were little, we didn’t have some of the really amazing textured balls you have now, and so we used to go to the pet shop because the pet shop always had the best textured balls. So if you’re battling for different textured balls, go to the pet shop. But I love the ones in particular, they’re very light, they’re very thin balls, and they’ve got little knobs all over them.
So they’ve got different textures and the knobs, some of them are bigger and smaller, and some of them are like hairy little wonderful textures. So they’re really great for experiencing different textures. And with my kids, I always had one basket in a room of the house that had every single textured ball that I could find.
And they knew that they could go in and dig around and find that one ball that they were able to get. And then the other thing quite fun with balls is that you can get balls that have a switch on them that do things. So maybe they make a noise, or maybe they actually just vibrate.
And those vibrating balls that kind of go in every different direction are always so much fun for toddlers to run after. So lots and lots and lots of different balls as options. Megan, as a strong advocate for kind of no screen time or limited screen time, books are always a great way to stimulate language skills.
The kind of learn with me activity book is an example of a toy that can promote language and cognitive development. Can you share some other examples of toys or activities that offer similar benefits? What a great question. So, and I love the fact that you put screens and language into the same question and books into the same package, because I think there is a misconception that if my child watches a screen, they will learn language.
And in actual fact, the research has shown conclusively that screens stand in the way of language. So you will have fewer words per hours that you’re watching TV. And so the kids who watch very little TV are going to have more words.
And I think that’s quite a statistic that parents need to get their head around, like it will hamper language development. So if screens are going to hamper language development, how do we enhance language development? And for me, the best thing is, of course, books. And I really think, you know, books bring, one of the things we spoke about when I, right when we started, they bring parent time.
And I think that’s very important. So, you know, having a little one being able to engage with you and go through a book with you is very valuable. Now, one of the things that I learned about a few years ago, and it was, it was a study out of, I think it was Reading University, if I’m not mistaken, in the UK, looked at book sharing, and that’s different to book reading.
And so when you book read, you pick up a book, and you follow exactly the words that are in the book. And, and it’s, it’s wonderful. So if that’s the only type of reading you’re going to do with your little one, go for it, because they’re going to develop the language.
You were telling me yesterday, I think that your little boy who, his language hasn’t been keeping up with his peers, and that’s been a concern. But he can recite books to you. So there is language, there is language benefit in the rhymes within the books, because often children can learn words that way.
And I in particular love the Julia Donaldson books, because… Oh, my best. Absolutely the best. Every single one of them.
Yeah. Which one of them is your favourite? Oh, depends on the child. So Grey is Tiddler, Superworm, I mean, so much so that we’ve had to laminate the books, each page, we had to tear the books apart, laminate them so that we could actually keep using them.
Tiddler, Superworm, and Squash and Squeeze. Jagger is Charlie Cook. Tabby McTat and Zog.
Nova is Schmooze and Schmerz. I don’t know that one. Oh, yes.
That is a firm favourite in this house, especially when they made the movie, you know, she releases one a year where they make the animation of it. And the animation’s beautiful of Schmooze and Schmerz. So Schmooze and Schmerz is Nova’s one.
And she also likes The Flying Doctors. Oh, I love it. Well, I mean, you’ve just listed so many of the wonderful ones.
Room in My Broom is one of my favourites. Oh, yeah, Grey loves that as well. But Squish and Squash and Squeeze was always my favourite.
Beautiful book. Just an incredible book. So yeah, so those rhyming books are great for language.
But I do want to go back to what this researcher said out of the university. And that was that actually sometimes it’s better to have a book with no words in it. And that’s what book sharing is.
And book sharing is when you’ve got a beautiful, illustrated book. It can be photographic or it can be illustrated. And you tell the story to your child.
So there is an obvious story that goes through it through the images. And a great one for that is Helen Uxbury books. Her books have got very few words in them.
So We’re Going on a Bear Hunt was one of hers. Ah, Jagger’s favourite at the moment. Literally every night we have to read that.
He’s obsessed. And so you know what I want you to do tonight, Terve, is I want you to take that book and I want you not to read it. I want you to tell it to him.
Because what happens when we tell the story is that it becomes much richer and we start to take it in the direction that’s more personalised. You’ll say, oh, look, there’s a butterfly that they were following. And do you remember when you saw that butterfly? And look, there’s Jagger.
And where’s the little boy hiding? And who’s in front and who’s behind? And immediately the story becomes a lot richer. So, you know, stories have the opportunity and books have the opportunity to become very, very rich when you don’t stick to the agenda and you don’t actually stick to the books. So books are great in any variance, but certainly I do think book sharing and then obviously our rhyming books are lovely.
Nova’s obsessed with the flap ones as well and the sensory ones. I didn’t mention those. She’s obsessed.
If she can’t open the flap or touch something, she’s like, don’t bother reading it to me. I’m very uninterested. Yeah.
And that’s a wonderful edge. So just to close us off, what were your top three tips for selecting toys this Christmas or just in life be? Yeah. So the first thing would be durability.
We really need to think about sustainable life choices and toys are really one of those. So before you spend one cent on that piece of junk that’s in a dollar shop, don’t do it. Just think it through.
It needs to be durable. It needs to be able to last for three children and it needs to be something that’s not going to end up in landfill. So that’s the first thing.
Please think about the environment. Think consciously as a parent because there’s a lot of junk out there. First thing.
Second thing is ask yourself how many things can we do with this? And if you can only find one thing to do with it, don’t buy it because your child will get very bored very quickly because their curious minds will not be activated by it. If there are a million things that you can do with it and it’s not closed ended like a box, that’s a good choice. So whatever you look at, make sure that you can do a lot of things with it.
And so even a storybook, how many words? Is it very limiting? Then maybe don’t get it. Or if you’re thinking about Lego and Duplo is an example. Duplo is a great example.
Don’t get the one that makes a very specific candy store because some of them are really very structured. They’re almost just actually like you might as well have just bought a house or whatever. So it’s rather go for like a box of Duplo, literally a box that has no plan, but just a whole lot of Duplo box and blocks in it or blocks or whatever it is.
So it’s more open ended. Try and go for open endedness and try and make sure that like how many things can I do with it? And one of the things I haven’t mentioned there is dress up clothes as an example, because you can be so many things that can take stories in any direction when you’re doing dress up. And then finally, my final principle would be to have a range.
So in your mind for this festive season, when people are asking you for what can I get, my grandchild, what can I get for your child? Have a little list and at the top of the list, make a category per development. So gross motor, fine motor, visual, language, listening as an example, and put one toy in each of those columns. And then you’ll get that lovely range of things that really can enhance development.
I love that. That’s such a good idea because you do just end up getting, you know, I also find that I just rewrap. So towards now, like early November, I go and hide a bunch of toys so that the kids forget they have them.
And then just so that the tree looks very big and festive. And also wrapping paper is a great toy, right? Oh, yes. Eighty percent of the Christmas was spent playing with the wrapping paper.
I then go and rewrap a bunch of toys we already have. And they all get excited again because they haven’t seen them for a month. And they’ll probably be more excited because they kind of know what to do with it, but they’re not sure.
And it’s familiar and they would love that. So I think that’s a lovely idea. Well, thanks, Meg.
That’s all I have for my side. I think that’s a really thorough look into, yeah, into toys and how to select them and the value they bring. Absolutely.
Yeah. So thank you very much for joining me, Terve. It was a great chat.
Thanks to everyone who joined us. We will see you the same time next week. Until then, download ParentSense app and take the guesswork out of parenting.
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